In the digital age, organizations increasingly rely on digitally-stored data. To protect against data loss, an organization may use a backup system to back up important data. In some situations, the organization may also use an archive system to preserve data or offload lesser used data to a more economical storage device.
Unfortunately, both backup systems and archive systems may consume significant amounts of computing resources. For instance, backups may consume storage space, and transferring data for backups may consume I/O bandwidth and network bandwidth. Additionally, the more data there is to backup, the longer backups may take to perform. Likewise, archiving files may consume network bandwidth and create latency when archived data is retrieved.
Traditional archiving technologies may reduce the costs of archive systems by leaving local copies of archived data in certain cases (e.g., for commonly accessed data) rather than removing the local copies immediately once the data has been archived. This may avoid the network bandwidth consumption and latency that may result from retrieving archived data. Unfortunately, this practice may exacerbate backup costs by leaving additional local data for a backup system to read, transmit, and store. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for performing backups efficiently.